“The quest for authenticity in leadership and communication is a healthy antidote”

Authenticity and deference should have balance in the workplace. Steve Doswell calls on organisations to wake up and smell the paint

There’s a yearning for keeping things real. In communications, we’ve witnessed the rise of what I’ll call the authenticity movement. That’s the desire to cut the cra…the excessive corporate cladding that can come between a business leader and her or his workforce, that wraps their language and their appearances in a heavy weight of set-piece claptrap.

Back in the late 1980s, when the end-of-century internal communication boom was in its infancy, I read a piece of employee feedback that has stayed with me ever since. Following the latest in a series of ‘royal’ visits by the then chief executive of my building society employer of the time, the employee wrote, “Tim must think the whole society smells of paint.” Terse, to the point, evocative – in nine words, that comment vividly captured the sheer artificiality surrounding so much interaction between business leaders and operational front lines of that time.

None of this is to criticise the individuals involved on that particular occasion. The organisation in question was – and remains - a highly successful business and for many a model employer, and the seeds of its present success were well-nurtured by those who ran the society at the time. And smartening up for visitors is not to be scoffed at. But a culture in which repainting the premises and giving business chiefs the royal treatment is one in which the power distance index seems excessive and not conducive to open and frank communication between organisational levels.

Of course one offers a level of respect to people in positions of responsibility. That’s true of business figures as it’s surely true of paramedics and train crew whose responsibility it is to get you from A to B safely. But there’s surely a chasm of difference between showing reasonable respect and bestowing undue deference on anyone. This isn’t about making a value judgement about what’s right or not right or about how savoury or otherwise one finds the notion of deference. Much more important than that, it’s about organisational effectiveness. Where there’s reasonable respect and expectations of an adult-to-adult relationship between corporate colleagues, regardless of their relative positions in the hierarchy, good dialogue can take place. In plain language, that means they can talk to each other as adults and learn from each other. Where there’s a high degree of deference, the conversation becomes more difficult and genuine dialogue is harder to achieve.

Incidentally, my reference above to ‘power distance index’ draws on the work of Geert Hofstede, one of the key figures of cross-cultural communication studies. Hofstede defined a series of measures to plot the characteristics of one culture against another. One such measure is the power distance index, which gauges how egalitarian a culture is, or rather, how egalitarian its members think it is.

In my remembrance of ‘royal’ visits past, I can almost smell that paint in the employee’s comment, rather like the flavour of Proust’s madeleine cake, now famous as a literary metaphor for the power of memory.

The kind of excessive deference evoked by that freshly-painted office still exists in some workplaces, of course. However, the quest for authenticity in leadership and communication is a healthy antidote. The caveat is to make sure that the authenticity is, well, authentic. Otherwise we succumb to a cynicism of false appearances, best summed up in the newscaster’s classic tip, “What’s the most important thing to be able to connect with an audience? Sincerity. If you can fake that, you can connect with anyone.”

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell and @ioicnews